Wednesday, March 27, 2019

Antibiotics: Action and Resistance

A series of fortunate events - including a cancelled holiday and an unpredictable British summer - in 1928 began the antibiotic revolution, when Alexander Flemming’s observation that a contaminating Penicillium colony caused lysis of Staphylococci.

Here’s a pictorial summary of various sites of action of modern-day antibiotics.

[Please click on the image to enhance it]


However, the capacity for prokaryotic bugs to develop resistance far outweighs the human capacity to develop new antiobiotic drugs.
Antibiotic resistance can be:
- Intrinsic: Inherent structural or functional characteristics, eg: vancomycin cannot cross the outer membrane of Gram negative bacteria.
- Extrinsic: Acquired through years of mutation and/or transfer of resistance properties. This evolutionary phenomenon is accelerated by selection pressure from antibiotic use, eg: beta lactamase producing Gram positive bacteria.



- Ashish Singh

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